Adding code snippets in VS Code

A short tutorial to make writing code a little faster

Photo by Matt Artz

I’m in the habit of scattering print statements around my code. This saves from having to step through a debugger to see what the code is doing. In the Dart language, it looks like this:

print('message');

Everything but the message inside the quotes is just boilerplate code that I have to type over and over. It gets kind of tiring and I’m slow because my fingers still don’t remember where the ( ) parentheses are on the keyboard. Even the autocomplete function in VS Code doesn’t give me what I want because after I’m finished typing the message inside the quotes, I still have to reposition the cursor at the end of the line so that I can add the final ; semicolon.

What I want is a shortcut that will give me the following:

print('|');

with my cursor positioned right between the quote marks. That would save me a ton of time. Well, it would save me like 3 seconds, … but those seconds add up, you know!

I remember back when I was using the IntelliJ-based Android Studio for Flutter development, you could add custom code snippets (some prewritten code) with a shortcut. Those were called Live Templates. I later switched to VS Code and have been happy with the change. I wrote about the…